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 Tuesday, November 07, 2006
I was hearing out Rachel’s business plan, running through the business goals and objectives. In essence, she was seeking to create an online community where people could swap and meet items with other community members in their area. Anything from collectibles, used clothes, old toys and what not, such an online community service could be eagerly in demand she said. After nailing down some concepts, we started to go into more specific details. The first logical step to building the community is to build the website in which most of these activities would gain a ramp up from. As the website is not meant to be the online front of a brick and mortar shop, Rachel did not have any organization name at hand to be used as part of the domain name for the new website. She did have one idea for an easy to remember and meaningful name though: “How about Goods Exchange? People can register in 3 simple steps and be on their way to exchanging goods with fellow community members!” she chirped enthusiastically. Amid my fits of laughter and her puzzled look at my reaction, I managed to pen down her desired website domain name on the notepad in front of us. www.goodsexchange.com
It took a while for her to get it and needless to say, she was understandably embarrassed but amused at the same time. In case you still do not get it, this domain name can easily be misread as GoodSexChange.com…. Choosing the right domain name can be critical to the success of your website. Your domain name is the only way visitors can find you on the Internet. Obviously you really need to spend more time coming up with the good domain name for your website. Rather than reinventing the wheel, here are a couple of links which might help you along: For those interested, Rachel didn’t use that domain name eventually. This might have or not been a good thing though. Sometimes a domain name such as the one mentioned above could garner the attention of the Internet community if only because it has viral marketing potential (think spreading of the domain name through friends and colleagues due to the humorous nature of the domain name in comparison to the actual services provided by the website). So that may have been what the following web enterprises had on their minds when they came up with the domain names for their sites……or not. Anyways, if you are genuinely interested in undergoing a sex change, here are some links you might find useful: www.comicsexchange.com www.veteransexchange.com www.musiciansexchange.com www.actorsexchange.com www.exoticsexchange.com www.graphicsexchange.com www.homesexchange.com www.kidsexchange.com www.momsexchange.com www.playersexchange.com www.womensexchange.com www.studentsexchange.comI could go on and on...but I'll leave you to do the exploring. Arthur
Technorati Tags:
choosing, domain, url, name, domain name, website, company, internet
With the next round of the console wars reaching its climax
this month, who would have thought that Nintendo would still be a viable player
in the fray. Once the king of the hill with its Nintendo Entertainment System
(NES), it has long been supplanted into third place by Sony and Microsoft.
With what could probably be its last hope to turn around its
fortunes, Nintendo has decided to introduce the Wii as its next generation
console. In my opinion, they have correctly chosen not to take on the Xbox 360
and Playstation 3 by competing on who has the fastest processor or who can
render the most realistic and beautiful graphics.
It seems that the videogame industry has devolved into a
impossible one upmanship on who has the most powerful hardware at that
particular moment. Microsoft, with its Xbox 360, jumped the gun last year and
was the first to enter the fray of the new generation of consoles. Touted as
the most powerful console in its day, the upcoming Playstation 3 by Sony will
soon shoot it out of the water, at least when you compare the spec sheets.
It seems that creating games that are actually fun to play
and easy to pick have fallen by the wayside in the race to be the “biggest,
baddest hombre” out there. I remember the golden age of gaming with my Sega
Genesis and Super Nintendo. Simple 2D graphics with tight and excellent
gameplay that offered hours of fun with nary a need to go to university to
learn how to play.
Nintendo has finally understood this and is going back to
making fun games again. Games that are not made for the narrow and traditional
demographic of teenage and 20ish males. Witness the success of the Nintendo DS,
with more than 21 million units sold, it has managed to reach non-traditional
gamers such as women and older people. It is a brilliant stroke of genius by
Nintendo. Why pour millions of dollars to fight for a slice of a diminishing
pie, it is definitely much better to go for the whole pie where the competition
is not present.
What Nintendo has learnt is a good lesson that many other
companies can learn in many other industries. Sometimes being short-sighted and
seeing a zero sum game in your industry may be crippling a much better strategy
of going for the bigger picture.
Dan
Technorati Tags:
Nintendo, Wii, Xbox 360, Playstation 3, PS3, videogames, Sony, MicrosoftAdd to: | Technorati | Digg | del.icio.us | Yahoo | BlinkList | Spurl | reddit | Furl |
Wednesday, October 11, 2006
We are rolling out a global CRM system for Imedeen that will encompass the whole suite of our applications for content management, customer profile management, e-marketing management, e-commerce management and e-loyalty management.
Read the press release here.
Joanne Technorati tags:
CRM, FMCG, Imedeen, loyalty marketing
Tuesday, October 10, 2006
The record companies and in turn their proxy, the Recording Industry of Singapore (RIAS), thinks so anyway.
Declining record sales, higher marketing dollars needed to promote our new artistes, ROI tanking. There's got to be only one reason for all of this, it has to be those darn teenagers and their rampant piracy. I digress, lots of ranting has already been spewed on the internet already, i'm not here to say how stupid they are (that fact has already been established).
The Straits Times today reported that the police raided some people's homes, confiscated their computers and recordable media. It seems every once in a while, the fat cats have to flex a bit of muscle. Like the saying goes, kill one person and you scare a hundred more. In Singapore, this tactic is definately a proven one.
Let's see what we have had to put up with so far, copy protected cds that have problems playing on certain players, wonky DRM that hobbled where i can listen to my music, rootkits that compromised my computer... and the list goes on.
Instead of coming up with stupid and alienating ideas to further discourage sales, how about introducing some of the good ones over to Singapore. Where is my itunes music store?!! Playnow and Soundbuzz don't count, their catalogues are miniscule and its not half as slick as Apple's rendition.
You would think that in the digital age, borders would be meaningless. I mean how difficult is it to allow people in Singapore to get their music from the itunes store in the US. Its not like we don't have the bandwidth. Well, greed is more powerful than technology it seems. Nothing like wanting to line your pockets to put consumer interest on the back burner.
As consumers, the most powerful weapon in out arsenal is to vote with our dollars. Refuse to buy CDs from artistes that are published by the major recording labels. We have to get it into their thick skulls that we are the consumers here, its your job to make us happy not ours to jump through hoops to prove we are not criminals. Until they get their act together and start making the process of purchasing music simple again, i say we spit on their faces.
Indeed, do you want to be no. 11? :)
Update: Looks like some of them are getting the big idea after all, albeit in the US. Disney/ABC and Fox to my knowledge are embracing the internet finally. http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061010-7946.html
Dan
Technorati Tags: Piracy, Music Downloads, Singapore, RIAS, MP3s
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Friday, October 06, 2006
Starhub today announced a little bit of "bait" to get thier dial-up customers to try some delicious green broadband. The idea it seems is to get these stalwarts of the 56K to try the blazing quickness of 4mbps, and once they have experienced the way the real internet is supposed to be, there is no turning back.
On the face of it, the logic is kinda sound. All you have to do is trump up like $80 to get a Starhub modem and ta-da! instant speedy internet. A win win situation for dial up users. Of course the devil is in the details.
Let's take a look at some of the sites that Starhub is making available to this scheme, Live Messenger, Yahoo Singapore (including mail), MSN Singapore (including Hotmail) and all domains ending with .gov.sg. This is by no means the exhaustive list (you can go here to check out the full offerings) and they do say they will be updating it but for a start this are the sites that i would be interested in.
So i have lightning fast instant messaging and i can check my emails with super quick efficiency. Not to mention, i can now search for stuff i need and get my results lickity split, but if i actually want to go to those results, i'm kinda out of luck.
I will give credit to Starhub for trying though, its a valiant effort to move more of thier dialup customers to the more lucrative broadband market. The problem is those people that have not moved over are not doing so for a reason. Making their switching costs high ($80 for something they already think they do not need) and severly limiting the real broadband experience is not going to make many of them switch over.
My suggestion to Starhub is this. Make it so ridiculously stupid for people not to move over. Send free cable modems to your dial up subscribers (0 swtiching costs). Don't limit where they can go (give them the real experience). Charge them a flat fee that is competitive with what they are already paying for dial-up (make it a no-brainer) and limit them by data or time usage instead. They are already light users and will be hard pressed to break a reasonable limit of say 5gigs a month, and at the same time, this will discourage the heavy data leechers from exploiting this new plan.
Link to Starhub's press release:
StarHub Press Release
Dan Technorati Tags: Starhub, Broadband, Dialup, Free Broadband, Singapore BroadbandAdd to: | Technorati | Digg | del.icio.us | Yahoo | BlinkList | Spurl | reddit | Furl |
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